Free Dream of the Blue Room by Michelle Richmond Page A

anyone mention the baby.”
    Dave hands a napkin to Stacy, who wipes her eyes. As he leans over and whispers something in her ear, I know in some deep sick part of my stomach that Dave is lost to me for the rest of the trip. Like the woman he saved from the burning car on the Palisades, Stacy offers him something I can’t—raw and undisguised need. Dave is moved by need in the same way other men are moved by beauty.
    She glances around the table at us, tries to smile, and says, “So that’s my story.”
    It’s nearly midnight by the time we’re finished with dinner. Graham hails a taxi, a tiny van with makeshift seating. He sits in a plastic lawn chair beside the driver, and Dave settles onto an old ice chest in the back. Between them is a poorly upholstered seat barely big enough for two, which Stacy and I share. The van has only one headlight. As we careen through the night, bumping and braking and shifting and screeching, the road visible through a hole the size of my shoe in the van’s rusty bottom, I hold on tight to the back of the driver’s seat, my heart pounding. In the back, Dave seems to be enjoying the ride, letting out a whoop every time we hit a bump. Once, when it seems we’re about to topple over, Stacy grabs my arm for balance.
    The taxi lets us off at the dock. Graham stays behind to pay, and as Stacy begins to walk ahead, Dave says to me quietly, “She needs to talk this thing through.”
    “Okay,” I say, which is what I always say, every time his pager goes off at 2 a.m., every time the woman from Chelsea calls. “Hi Jenny. It’s me again. Sorry to call so late.”
    Dave hurries ahead to catch Stacy. She stops, says something to him I can’t hear. The two of them step onto the floating dock that leads to the Red Victoria . With every step, I feel him leaving me not only in body, but in mind. By the time he reaches the ship, he will have entirely forgotten me.
    Graham exchanges a few pleasant words with the driver, and then, as if it is the most natural thing in the world, he takes my hand. “Look,” he says, turning around to face Nanjing. The whole city is aglitter with lights, the full moon glows red, the river rolls past, the boards of the dock creak and whine.
    “It could be any city, couldn’t it?”
    He’s right. This could be any city, any country. At night it ceases, somehow, to be China. In this light, I don’t feel so far from home. Stacy and Dave have been swallowed up by the fog. Their voices carry toward us, then fade. Graham lets go of my hand and puts one arm around me.
    “Is it just me?” he asks.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Am I fooling myself to think you might feel something too?”
    “I can’t answer that.” The night is warm and heavy, a drop of sweat slides down my spine. My heart speeds up, my breath comes quickly. I’m afraid to say anything, afraid that when I do, I will be delivering myself to him entirely. Finally, I look up at him. “What happens next?”
    “We have thirteen days. Let’s make the most of it. Of course, there’s the matter of your husband. He’s a nice fellow.”
    “You mean that nice fellow who just walked away with another woman?”
    “I don’t want to go stepping on any toes.”
    “He moved out two months ago.”
    “In a selfish way I’m glad to hear it. Did you see it coming?”
    “Not really. One night he came home late, set a bag of take-out Chinese on the counter, and said, ‘This isn’t working.’”
    I remember how flat Dave’s voice sounded, devoid of emotion. He might as well have been telling me the newspaper hadn’t come that morning, or that the Chinese restaurant had raised its prices. What made it worse was that I’d been waiting up for him, and I was wearing a new lace nightgown, trying to entice him. If he noticed the nightgown, he didn’t mention it. I wonder if somehow the nightgown itself inspired him to put an end to everything that night. Maybe when he saw it, he realized I was trying to make